How to Audit a Competitor's SEO for Free in 60 Seconds

You scroll through a competitor's category page on a Tuesday afternoon. Their product photography is better. Their copy is sharper. Their site feels faster. You wonder: what are they actually doing differently from a technical SEO standpoint, and how much of it could I copy?

You could pay $99 a month for a tool that promises competitive intelligence. You could also spend 60 seconds running a free external audit and learn most of what you need to know about their technical setup. The paid tools are essential when you're trying to reverse-engineer their backlink strategy or their paid traffic mix — but for technical SEO, schema, page speed, and indexability signals, the information is sitting in plain sight.

The legitimate-curiosity case

This isn't about spying. You can't see your competitor's Google Analytics, you can't see their conversion rate, you can't see their margin per SKU. What you can see is what Google sees — and what Google sees affects how their store ranks against yours.

Three reasonable questions to ask of any competitor:

• What technical decisions are they making that I'm not?
• Where do I genuinely outperform them, so I can lean harder on that pillar?
• Where am I behind in a way that's recoverable in under a month?

If the answer to any of those changes how you spend the next week, the audit was worth running.

What an external audit can tell you

A non-authenticated audit — one that just visits your competitor's URL with a browser, the same way Google would — gives you a lot:

• Schema markup: which Product, Organization, BreadcrumbList schemas they're using, and whether they're valid. Visible in the HTML source.
• Page speed and Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP (or FID historical), CLS, all measurable from outside. PageSpeed Insights does this for free against any public URL.
• Indexability signals: their robots.txt, their sitemap.xml, their canonical tags, their noindex usage. All public.
• Mobile experience: how their site renders on mobile viewports, how their tap targets compare.
• Sitemap depth and structure: how many products, how the URL hierarchy is organized.
• Image SEO: alt text, file naming conventions, format choices (WebP vs JPEG vs PNG).
• Third-party stack: what analytics, chat, review, and personalization tools they've loaded (visible via DevTools Network tab or via Wappalyzer).

For technical-SEO competitive analysis, that list covers most of the actionable surface area.

What you cannot learn from outside

Equally important to know what's off-limits:

• Backlink profile: which sites link to them. Requires Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz.
• Paid traffic mix: how much they spend, on which networks, for which keywords. Requires SpyFu, SimilarWeb paid tier, or Meta's Ad Library (partial).
• Conversion rate and revenue: not visible from outside, full stop.
• Email and retention performance: open rates, list size, lifecycle email cadence.
• Inventory levels and supplier relationships: invisible.

Don't pretend to know what you can't see. A competitor whose pages load fast and whose schema is clean is still losing money if their checkout is broken, and you can't audit that from outside.

A walkthrough with EshopAuditor's Compare feature

EshopAuditor's Compare view takes two URLs, runs the full audit on both, and shows you the four-pillar breakdown side by side: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO. Each pillar gets a numeric score (0–100) and an itemized list of issues, with a diff column that highlights where your site and theirs disagree.

Imagine running a comparison between two hypothetical fashion shops, fashion-demo.example and competitor-demo.example. The output might look something like:

The diff panel then shows specifics: their Product schema is valid on every PDP; yours is missing on 40% of pages. Their hero images are WebP; yours are PNG. They preload critical fonts; you don't. Their robots.txt is clean; yours blocks /products/* accidentally (this happens).

In ten minutes you have a prioritized list of what to fix. The SEO gap of -24 is your highest-leverage target, and within it, fixing Product schema and the robots.txt issue is two hours of work, not two months.

The head-to-head wins framing

Run the same comparison against three competitors instead of one. Patterns emerge fast. If all three of them ship Product schema and you don't, that's your top priority. If two of three have CLS under 0.1 and yours is 0.3, you're losing visible polish that affects bounce rate before it affects ranking.

But the more interesting question is the inverse: where are they missing something you could capitalize on? If none of your competitors have HowTo schema on their guides, and you have buyer guides, you can claim that SERP real estate uncontested. If their alt text is poor and you're competitive in image search, you can lean further into that channel.

Don't copy them. Find what they miss.

The temptation when auditing a competitor is to make a list of everything they're doing and replicate it. That's the wrong frame. They have years of compounding decisions, and copying their current state lands you behind them by definition.

The better frame: identify the cheapest gaps you can close in 30 days, then identify the strategic gaps in their setup that you can fill while they're not looking. The first set keeps you competitive. The second set is where actual outperformance comes from.

A competitor audit isn't a copy-and-paste exercise. It's a way to focus the next 30 days of work on the highest-return changes, and to spot the channels nobody in your category is bothering to defend.

Run a free comparison at eshopaudit.io — no signup required for the first scan.